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Now & Forever ABCs (Paolo)

Paolo Matteo Cristoforo Constellino

19 September 1972

Paolo has always been a bookworm, though he had his share of (mis)adventures outside with friends and siblings while growing up.

He was born and raised in Naples, Italy and has long held a deep love for the history of both his home city and his home country. He would spend hours at a time in the library devouring books on both history and mythology, but soon he ran out of those and started absorbing anything else the library had to offer — and Paolo is one of those people blessed with the ability to get through whole novels in a matter of hours.

Paolo eventually grew into a tall, well-built young man. In his teens he had taken a fondness for sports cars of all sorts, from American muscle cars to the high performance works of art put out by Italy and Germany. He had a special soft spot for the Camero — especially the first and second generation styles. He and his friends spent a great deal of time trying to fix up a junker that Sergio, the youngest of the group of friends, had managed to buy: a Pontiac GTO that was possibly more rust than body, had less than half an engine, five flat tires (even the spare had a hole in it), and was missing the windscreen. The eight boys made it their mission in life to make that care the envy of Naples. They didn’t succeed, but they did get it running reasonably well and gave it a rather eye catching paint job.

When it came time to go to University, Paolo was adamant that he would attend in Rome — the very centre of the universe to him at the time. He was accepted at Sapienza – Università di Roma where he took a dual major in History and Library Science.

Eventually, through a mutal friend, he met Zoë Ayishah, an alluring French woman studying architectural engineering and mathematics. The two became friends, and she asked him on a few dates. Before long he was one of her handful of regular boyfriends.

As time went on the handful of boyfriends came down to only Paolo, and a few months before graduation the pair were engaged. Not so long after their graduation Zoë discovered — to the couple’s absolute shock, given that Zoë had been told she was sterile — she was pregnant. The couple’s wedding plans we left unchanged, so Paolo stood at the altar beside a three months pregnant bride happier than he could recall ever feeling.

The honeymoon was short a week in Switzerland, a gift from Zoë’s parents, then they were busy trying to settle into a small house in Toronto, Canada where Zoë had been offered her first job with a small architectural firm. Paolo had little interest in teaching, so took his Library Sciences degree to the nearest library to put it to use.

Zoë found a better position with a company in Colorado and, three years after settling in Canada the family found themselves in the Rocky Mountains, in a little apartment in Estes Park while they looked around for a house — Zoë being adamant that a child needed a yard with trees in to grow properly, especially when said child was Salencia. They quickly found a home for sale in a nearby tourism town. The ranch style home was spacious, beautiful, and had a small stables and a lot of acres.

The first wedding anniversary at their new home, Paolo came home to find a small note on the table, wife and daughter nowhere to be seen, and an unfamiliar set of keys laying on the table. Following the note he went out to the stables to find a chrome and black 1971 Camaro with leather seats, in beautiful condition, and his wife waiting inside wearing a smile and holding champagne. His gift to his wife, delayed a couple of hours, was to drive her out to a local ranch to select a horse.

Zoë taught him and their daughter how to ride, before long the household had a second horse for him. The family began spending a lot of time together on trails, their little girl riding in a parent’s lap (often Paolo’s — the little girl being positively enamoured with his mare, Elouise).

Paolo is very fond of his family. He teases his wife and daughter for their direct and irreverent manners, which can lead them to seem utterly lacking in social grace, and for their attitudes toward God, but he’s intensely proud of them for their stubborn insistence on always being who they are and speaking what’s on their mind regardless what anyone else may think — even him.

It only saddened him to discover his daughter was a lesbian, because he’d long dreamt of being the beaming new grandpa waiting to hold the tiny newborn child — a detail that came and went in the blink of an eye; he was saddened far worse and far longer by the fact that it upset Sally to be both rejected by the young lady she’d taken an interest in and by so many of her classmates. He watched helplessly as people called her names, and avoided her; he defended her and fiercely where and when he could, usually without Sally’s knowledge when speaking to parents of a few of her friends. Needless to say, he was actually thrilled by the job offer in Washington, knowing that the state was notoriously more open minded.

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I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this. I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.

~~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

J. R. R. Tolkien in his introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:
“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

"Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!"

~~ Gore Vidal

“There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”

― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

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